Yep, all hyper-centralized systems are VERY similar, even if one is ruled by "Apparatchicks" and pretends to be Marxist and the other is ruled by "Execs" and speaks of profits and competition all day long.

And yes, Stalinism sucks - a tiny minority of bureaucrats controlls everything and mismanages everything. Its like a badly-managed megacorp. The RL Chinese state capitalism masquarading as a "People's Republic" is much like a well-managed megacorp - the workers are screwed and exploited, but the ruling clique reeks in money and controls a hefty portion of the world's economy.

Any state claiming to be "socialist" or "communist" or a "people's democracy" without having a true democratic system is neither: it's just a stalinist state. True socialist democracy is a system in which each workplace is managed by its own workers - rather than by a Party-appointed boss - and each community is managed by a locally- and freely-elected council - rather than by a centralized Party apparatus and it's thought-police state. Democratic Socialism doesn't meant that society owns you, your clothes, your food and everything else - it just means that society - controlled by local elected bodies - is the biggest producer in the market and produces goods according to the wishes of the people (including quality control; Stalinist quality control was HORRIBLE because of the lack of input from the masses). Democratic Socialism also means that you can elect, and, if needed, replace, your own boss. You could just call it a "democratic economy" rather than "Socialism" or "Communism". In such an economy you would still own your private posessions, but the factories will be owened by their workers rather than by capitalists/apparatchicks.

Anyone who supported such ideas in Russia was labeled as a "Trotskist" and was "disappeared" by the Cheka/NKVD/MGB/KGB - including most of thoe who took part in the October Revolution. By 1938, all of the revolutionaries were purged out of the USSR - except for Alexandra Collontai who kept a very low profile and accepted the new ruling clique and Leon Trotski, who was murdered in 1940 by a Stalinist agent. And yes, life in the USSR sucked - I know several people who lived there in the 1980's. Anyone who justifies the crimes of Stalinism isn't a socialist, and does not seek the best interests of the working class - quite to the contrary.

Cambodia was even worse, because the Khmer Rouge (sp?) were not even aiming at creating a centralized Stalinist state - they idealized the "simple way of life of the Khmer people" and held horribly racist ideas spiced up by some Communist jargon. And North Korea is Stalinism at its worst - even worse than Stalin's Russia.

Cuba isn't as bad as North Korea or even the USSR - but it is still Stalinist and neither a democracy nor Socialist (even though, like all other Stalinist states, it pretends to be both). It still suffers from all the faults of Stalinism and is by far NOT a democracy. While it isn't repressive as other similar regimes, it still lacks the freedom of speech or of representation and is still controlled from above by a privileged Party elite that wastes alot of productive forces on both luxury, military buildup and sheer bureaucratic inefficiency.

That said, I think that there would be alot of pseudo-socialist ideas floating around in the Sixth World. With the opressive Corporate control over everything, alot of workers will look for an alternative - and alot of opportunist politicians will jump on that source of power. A few will actually support Democratic Socialism, others will support the various Anarchist ideals, some will support Stalinism or Maoism (that is, Stalinism with a strong guerilla tendancy), and some will try to put forward a mish-mash of populist ideas intended to pull the masses after them. And, ofcourse, add to this various neo-tribalist and anti-corp Awakened groups.

Anti-capitalism in all forms should be a major underground current in the Shadowrun universe.

Socialism, in its original and true form, is NOT based on "conscience"; it is based on democratic and local control over the means of production (i.e. factories). It is not based on making the people "good" and "nice" to each other, it is based on making every decision maker (in economy or politics) elected and recallable and is subjected to far more checks and balances than today. Socialism is based on the same basic premises of the idea of Democracy, applied to the economy as well.

Stalinism ("Communism", as in the USSR/Cuba/North Korea), ofcourse, is based on the absolute control excersized by a privilegued (sp?) bureaucratic clique over EVERYTHING, from politics to economy to culture.

The Shadowrun universe doesn't run according to "capitalism." Free market economies must be based on the rule of law: businessmen are subject to arrest and prosecution for breaking laws. A corporation can be fined for breaking the law.

In Shadowrun, businesses are states, organizations legally coequal with governments and financially superior. This is not "capitalism."

Frankly, it's insanity. Taking one group of people and making them immune to laws is and always has been a recipe for abuse of authority.

I would think that the Shadowrun universe has a lot of political movements based around an alliance of anti-business Socialists and pro-free market forces who have combined to agitate for the end of corporate extraterritoriality.

Socialists and free marketers disagree on a lot, but they agree on this principle and it is the most egregiously wrong social structure in Shadowrun. Most of the rest of the dystopian nature of Shadowrun results from this insanity.

The US, at least, had it shoved down their throats by the Supreme Court. Other nations adopted it voluntarily. This was a move of unsurpassed stupidity and suicidal obliviousness.

Depends on what you mean by "Socialism." In discussions like this, Socialists tend to use a very expansive definition as a form of verbal sleight-of-hand. Like the previous poster who claimed that "In a true capitalism, you do not have monopoly laws,or even rules dealing with things such worker safety."

This is simply incorrect. It is, bluntly, a fiction promulgated by Socialists to justify far more intrusive Socialistic measures (like the wholesale owning of industires by the government): "Anti-monopoly laws are required and that's Socialism, so Socialism is required and the government owning the steel industry is okay!"

The earliest modern economic theoretician, Adam Smith, noted that free markets require the robust rule of law. A functioning free market requires the ability for businesses to enter and leave a market freely. Monopolies or oligopolies hinder this.

Yet, businesses seek to monopolize. To paraphrase Adam Smith: "It is rare that any 3 businessmen meet to talk, that their discussion does not turn to a restraint of trade." Thus, businessmen seek their own benefit, at the expense of the wider society, by creating monopolies.

Laws regulating monopolies are thus required: Monopolies harm societies and economies and are therefore, even in Free Market economies, a perfectly apt subject for making and enforcing laws.

Let me reiterate: Free market economies require laws that ban certain activites businesses are likely to engage in. This is not "Socialism" and claims to the contrary are simply mistaken.

The arguments among free marketers revolve around how to regulate these activities and what areas ought be subject to laws.

Laws are required, but cause bad effects: they make it more expensive for entreprenuers to enter the market. In other words, over-regulation by the government can also create monopolies.

In fact, many businessmen lobby the government to create "safety" regulations that serve only to hinder competition.

Back to Shadowrun: Like I said above, Shadowrun isn't an example of a free market world. It's an example of a world where businesses were exempted from taxation and regulation, and therefore could engage in restraint of trade to their heart's content.

Like I said above, insanity.

Perhaps I haven't seen enough checks and balances, but every example of socialism I've seen (especially things like welfare, medicare, etc.) seems to have a giant hole for the greedy to profit at the expense of his neighbors.

After all, if you could elect your own boss, wouldn't you elect the one who let you slack off the most? The problem with people governing themselves directly is they will govern themselves for their own best interest if they lack a social conscience. Having read the Communist Manifesto, I wasn't impressed with the foresight shown in this particular area. Rather, it simply sounded like everyone would be delighted to work for his neighbor without any thoughts for his own desires, as long as his basic needs were met. An enjoyable fiction, but fiction nonetheless. But as I said, perhaps I simply haven't seen enough checks and balances at work.

Well, that depends on what one means by "basic needs" One can easily include psycologial needs in this catagory. Meterial contentment and fulfilment of ambition could be seen as basic needs from some point of view. So long as these are fulfilled everything will be fine. However, the real problem with Communism is implimenting it within a command economy is impossible. In order to fufill the ideal one requires a surpluss economy, in which materials and goods are so abundant that they no longer have any value. The "We don't use money in the 22ed century" Utopia of Star Trek is an example of such an economy. If one can use a replicator to instantly create any item, even more replicators, from spare atoms then the only things that have value are base atoms. If the machine can construct atoms from base particles than only those particles would have any value and substomic particles are so abundant that they really wouldn't be worth much.

It really depends on the scarcity of the fuel source. If the fuel isso abundant as to have no intrinsic value, then entropy is such a negligable factor on the economy that it can be ignored. Sure, it will catch up to this abundance economy in a few trillion years, bbut untill we approach the heat death of the universe there will always be more raw matter to put into the economy. Matter mining is made so much easier by the fact that one doesn't have to seperate out the precious metals and minerals as they do today. The replicators can simply break any matter down and reconfigure it into formerly precious materials.

It is pretty much confirmed that there is no money in the Federation at all. Other cultures still use currency, which is why they are always talking about latnum (a precious metal that apparently can't be replicated using standard means and the defavcto currency of the alpha quadrent. It is never explained why this metal can't be replicated but it is sort of a cop-out so that the Ferringi emphasis on capitalism could actually work in such close proximity to the Federation.)

The great thing about E=Mc^2 when it comes to matter reconfiguration is that it works both ways. Matter<->Energy is pretty much a 1:1 reaction, excepting entropy. One would need to introduce a little extra into the system to overcome entropy but not so much.

So communism works beautiful assuming that:

1) You can have anything you want. If you want to be king of the world, you can be
1b) You don't want anything. A happy drug makes you not care about being king of the world.
2) Anything you could desire can be easily created with a minimum of work, making money and industry largely redundant.


Works for me! I'm a communist now.

communist my foot, more like monarcy or despotism then communism...

only way this can turn into communism is if everyone owns a share in the mother corp and therefor have a say in the running of said bussiness...

oh wait, is that how aztechology or horizon is run?

as stated, remove all emotions and presto, utopia. a very boring place, if we still know what that word means (isnt bordom a emotion?) but still a utopia...

Nominally, yes. Horizon is an employee owned corporation, which means that ideally everyone is equal. It's just that presumably some are more equal than others. How that is rigged up hasn't really been described, but this being Shadowrun we can presume that it's been subverted somehow by at least one group.

Aztechnology has a similar setup in which nominally everyone in Aztlan has a say in the direction things move - it's just that the people who actually make those descisions are those in charge of counting and interpretting those electronic votes.

So in either case, everyone has a say, it's just that your say doesn't especially matter and the entire collective pretty much does exactly what it was going to do if you had said nothing. Stalin had a similar setup. He could claim to be leading a communist country because everyone had a say in the economic direction. It's just that in reality if your say wasn't pretty similar to what he wanted it to be you could be shipped off to Siberia.

Same idea. Communism requires every worker to have a voice. It doesn't require the management to care.

-Frank

and that makes it communism in name only. or basicly just a mask for despotism/monarchy (it all depends on spin realy)...

hmm, that more equal then others comment makes me think of the pigs in animal farm. yes it was a spoof on communism but for some oddball reason it shows that it can work, only that everyone have to take on the responsiblity to make it work and remove those that try to exploit the system.

in the end the flaw isnt the basic system, its man. we are all just greedy, lazy, power hungry liers at heart...

Well, you actually can have Communism and Despotism at the same time. Communism is an economic system characterized by planned resource distribution and a single interest that represents both Capital and Labor. The system of government you use to make those plans and represent those interests could be anything from Pluralistic Democracy to Iron Handed Despotism to Anarchic Dartboard. The personal freedom allowed to any particular worker could be anything from State Sponsored Expression to Nerve Stapled Drone.

As a total aside, Animal Farm was intended as a criticism of Soviet Stalinism, Orwell himself was a Trotskyist.

I've always found that to be a cop out. Any particular economic system does not give you democracy and freedom, it simply allows it. There is an absolute limit to how much democracy you can sustain under Capitalism because of Investor Veto. But that doesn't mean that any particular society that uses an investment capitalism model of economics is guaranteed to have that much democracy - look at Argentina!

Sure, under Communism you can have virtually unlimited amounts of democracy. That doesn't mean that you will. And that's not a flaw with the communist system, and it's not a problem with humanity in general. That's a social problem (or more likely several problems) in whatever country isn't living up to its potential. If that sort of thing was inherent in anything as universal as economic systems or the human condition, Britain and Australia would be ruled by their own Pinochets right now.

-Frank

Lets say the equation for converting one form of matter to another at 1% entropy is this

M->E->M2 where E= (Mc^2) - (Mc^2)*.005 and M2 = (E/c^2)-(E/c^2)*.005

This could be expressed as the functions f(M) = (Mc^2) - (Mc^2)*.005 = E and f(E)= (E/c^2)-(E/c^2)*.005 = M2 combined into the function

f(f(M)) = [(Mc^2)/c^2] - 2[(Mc^2/c^2)*.005] = M - M*.01 =M2

Therefore, while one looses quite a bit of energy in the conversion one only looses a small ammount of mass. For ever 99 kilograms of output you need 100 kilograms of input. THis mass could simply be obtaining be beaming random spacerocks abord.

Incidently, it is the transporter technology that the replicators are based on. They most certainly do not use nano technology.

hmm, interesting.

it wasnt a cop out, i was aiming it at both sides. the moment that the people gets lazy in monitoring their leaders, they risk having control taken away from under their feet.

right now, britan and australia is ruled by people thats listening more and more to big corp then the masses. australia is a offshot of british rule. the brits where the one group that had the best luck shutting down their colonial systems and handing over control to democratic goverments.

for some reason those words form a US general sounds strangely correct, even tho they where aimed at the time towards stalins sovjet: "freedom requires eternal vigilance".

why it is that britain and australia have yet to colapse or end up with a rotten ruler i dont know. maybe because they have ties to older systems of goverment? as in, they have links, directly or indirectly to old ideas of self-control. in comparison most of the nations in south america and africa are young nations. allso, mixing diffrent etnical groups into the same nation have a bad habbit of blowing up without a leader that wants to represent the people, not just one etnical group. some african nations and the balcan nations have both shown this.

and we should never forget that hitler was elected to power in a democratic system...

And yet he's still heaps better than any of the alternative choices.

Wow. The guy sounds like a real tool.

I'm glad we don't have anyone like that here in the United States!

Actually, we should never forget that Hitler never won a contested election in his life. Hitler lost the election, but was allowed into the government as part of a power-sharing agreement to keep the Nazis from filibustering the democratic process. After that, it was a series of manuvers that would have made Richard III proud that elevated Hitler to the top.

But no, he wasn't fairly elected. The leftists and moderates simply wussed out. They felt that confronting him wasn't worth upsetting the apple cart. Kind of like how Gore voluntarily allowed Bush to walk away with Florida in 2000.

-Frank

In fairness to Mr. Gore, he lost in a decision of the Supreme Court, which pretty much nipped in the bud any future legal angles for the advancement of his case.

As embarassing as the whole thing was, its a tribute to the republican (small r) version of government, and the rule of law, that a country can have a heavily contested election end with a legal solution. (You can not like said legal solution if you want, but everyone has to agree, its preferable to tanks rolling into the streets.)

Oh yes, and indeed that's what pretty much everyone said in 2000 (including me). Of course, in hindsight... tanks are rolling in the streets.

-Frank

Where do you live that tanks are rolling in the streets?

And this speaks to the diverse definitions, and qualities, of democracies. A democracy w/o inherent checks and balances simply cries out for instability. Talk all you want to the "fairness" of parliamentary Democracies, but never forget how Hitler came to power.

Well, he passed a series of emergency measures in response to a terrorist attack that he may well have known of in advance and subsequently used those emergency powers to crush desent. It is certainly "of that sort".

Hussein got elected repeatedly because he was the only candidate. You checked a box that said "Saddam" or people came to your house and beat you senseless. Now, Saddam's path to power is pretty convoluted. In 1958 he attempted to assassinate the prime minister of the country, failed, and fled the country. In 1963, the Baath party was in power and he returned to Iraq and married his cousin. But the Baath party was overthrown and he went to prison for the whole attempted assassination thing. The Baath party threw a coup five years later (they have a five year coup cycle apparently), and Saddam jostled his way up into the ruling revolutionary council when they sprung him from prison. He spent the next 11 years being Thug #1 for president-for-life Ahmed Hassan Bakr. In 1979, he became head of state and put all his rivals to death. In 1980 he received funds and weapons from the United States to go on an all-out sneak attack on Iran, which ended in miserable defeat. By 1990, the Bush administration was no longer funding him and began actively attempting to pull him out, which they abandoned as unprofitable at the end of Gulf War I when Hussein agreed to give cheap oil to the US. And the rest, is history.

Ask three socialists or communists, you'll get four answers. At least. Marx saw socialism as an early stage of worker-control in which people were paid according to work, with communism being an advanced state in which people were paid according to need. There's a lot of other stuff that goes hand in hand with that, but the basic difference is that in Socialism you earn your way with your labor, and in communism your labor for the collective is assumed and you get what you need.

You can now sit back and watch the inevitable argument as to what constitutes "need" vs. "wants" and all that.

Ask three historians...

Right. The U.S.S.R. ended WWII with the most f'ed up third of the world while the United States had the most economically developed and pristine 2/3 of the world. So ultimately it didn't really matter what they did, because they were in an economic competition with a stronger player who had deeper pockets, so that wasn't going anywhere good. Also there was the whole thing where if you kill enough people for not agreeing with you, eventually noone agrees with you.

If the United States had continued its alliance with the Soviet Union after WWII, the Soviet Union would still be alive today. Also, humanity as a whole would be about 30 years ahead in space technology and the nuclear club would have been much much smaller (possibly being just the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R., France, and China). With no cold war to destroy Latin America or Africa, there would be a lot less militarized zones.

-Frank

Which reminds me, I need to stop by the mall and pick up my pre-order of Revenge of the Sith.

Anyway, I'm impressed that this thread has made it this far without anyone making a "In Soviet Russia, Shadowrunners double-cross their Mr. Johnson." joke.

Also, has anyone noticed that certain communist ideals seem to be alive and well in the Open Source Software Movement? Not saying that it's a bad thing, I'm just saying it's there.

I have a serious objection to that statement Frank. the Termination of the alliance between the Soviet Union and the other allies was, if anything at the behest of the Soviet Union. I would point out such elements as the UK and US not protesting Stalin's installing his own Polish Government (when there was a legitimate exile government in London) as well as turning over anti-soviet partisans and others to a quick death in the Soviet Union, all which were done with the clear intent of keeping the Soviets Placated and "IN" with the whole "united nations".

we can argue a realist perspective about a bi-polar power alignment or take the ideological angle that the Soviet and US systems were bound to come into conflict, but to say that

"If the United States had continued its alliance with the Soviet Union after WWII, the Soviet Union would still be alive today"

is simply not true.